[Bug 863524] [NEW] friendly-recovery changes in oneiric adds complication

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You have been subscribed to a public bug by komputes (komputes):

Recovery mode gets stuck on "Loading Initial Ramdisk". This used to
happen consistently, with latest updates only happens once in a while
(indicative of a race condition that does not alway end in the same
order). When I am able to access recovery mode, keyboard input freezes
after the kernel loads. This blocks me from selecting recovery options
in the curses interface. Recovery menu does not present the same options
as it used to. This change[1] was not documented [2].

Q: In Oneiric when you boot into recovery mode, you get 
resume		Resume normal boot
fsck		        Check all file systems (will exit read-only mode)
remount	Remount / read/write and mount all other file systems
root		Drop to root shell prompt
I want to use netroot or dpkg, what do I do? 
A: fsck or remout.

I was told that the menu changing, is a feature - not a bug, necessary
in order to give users the full range of recovery. If we mount the
filesystem read-write at the beginning, you can't do certain kinds of
filesystem recovery. Can't bring up the network in ro.

This new feature bothers me and I don't think it will be well understood
by the end user. Perhaps there is a better way to implement this change.
I preferred the old static menu. From what I understand fsck should run
automatically in ro if dirty filesystems were detected and issues are
not correctable (or if it had passed a number of boots without a check,
it would then preform a check). As I understand it, the older menu was
mounting everything read/write and starting all the system services
before showing the recovery menu.

Some other things we need to test in recovery-menu which often fail:
telinit freezes (test going from recovery mode to runlevel 0-5)
resume does not bring me to lightdm, only to a text login prompt
netroot runs dhclient even though the machine already grabs an address when booting (what is the point of netroot *and* root)
Running /lib/friendly-recovery/recovery-menu from gnome-terminal, I still have to do remount. It doesn't detect that the root filesystem is already mounted. Why does friendly-recovery assume I am running it at boot time in ro?

cryptsetup and ecryptfs are not installed. This is a vanilla oneiric
install, updated on a test machine, all intel (no restricted drivers).
friendly-recovery is at 0.2.18.

Please let me know how you would like to proceed. If you need separate
bugs. Let me know how to split them and I will create a bug. This is
simply a request for review of recovery-menu code since there are many
issues in oneiric.

[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/friendly-recovery/+changelog
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: friendly-recovery 0.2.18
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.19-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Sep 30 13:36:08 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Beta i386 (20110913)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: friendly-recovery
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-30 (0 days ago)

** Affects: friendly-recovery (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: apport-bug i386 oneiric running-unity
-- 
friendly-recovery changes in oneiric adds complication
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/863524
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